The Family Lawyer

  “Still,” Randy says, “this hypothetical hobo might be able to tell us where it happened—between what and what stops. At least we’d know where to canvass. With all the cops and guardsmen around, it’s possible someone saw something.”

  He’s right—it’s the next logical step—but my gut tells me no one saw a thing. Besides, witness testimony isn’t how we catch this guy.

  Branford shows up. He doesn’t even look at the DOA, just walks straight to Randy and points in my direction.

  “One of the chimps in that media circus out there spotted her,” he says. “Now they’re all asking questions. This is exactly what I said couldn’t happen.”

  Something in what he says sparks an idea.

  “That’s how we draw him out,” I say.

  “What?” Branford says. “Why is she talking?”

  “The media,” I say. “We talk to him through the media. Say the right things, and he’ll talk back.”

  Branford screws his face up into a portrait of skepticism.

  “What kind of things?” he asks. “What is it you think he wants to hear?”

  “It’s more a question of what he doesn’t want to hear,” I say. “Right now, he’s a God in his own mind. He perches up high and plucks people from the face of the earth. He’s got the whole city scrambling. He’s like sex—nobody goes more than eight seconds without thinking about him. That’s exactly the kind of attention he craves.”

  “The same’s true of any serial killer,” Branford says. “Remind me how you’re helping?”

  “We knock him off his perch. Put out a profile that’s so demeaning and humiliating, he won’t be able to stop himself from contradicting us.”

  Branford turns his back to me like it isn’t even worth discussing, but Randy looks past him, starts to nod.

  “We trick him into dropping the script,” he says. “This guy’s planned every step. Make him improvise, and he becomes vulnerable.”

  Branford shifts his gaze from detective to detective, in search of a dissenter. No one looks back. After a while, he gives up, lets out a showy sigh.

  “Does no one but me see the potential for this to blow up in our faces?” he asks. “Piss the guy off, and maybe he trades his rifle in for a machine gun. Maybe he schedules an afternoon shift.”

  “It’s a risk,” Kelly says. “But until he slips up, we’ve got nothing. No forensics. No witnesses. Every marksman in the tristate area accounted for.”

  Branford waits the obligatory beat before conceding.

  “I want a department profiler on this,” he says. “That way it’ll at least look like we thought it through.”

  Randy starts to agree, but I cut him off.

  “It should come from me,” I say. “The disgraced cop. He’ll take it as an insult, think we’re cheapening his sacred mission.”

  Branford pivots, does his best to loom over me. I catch some hurt-feeling looks from my fellow detectives: I’ve overstepped.

  “What part of make yourself invisible don’t you understand?” Branford says.

  I square my shoulders, grin up at him.

  “Think of it this way,” I tell him. “If this does blow up in our faces, you can lay it all on me.”

  Chapter 9

  Miles sits alone in his wide Hell’s Kitchen loft, sipping a power smoothie. Dark shades cover the windows; the thousand-plus square feet are lit by a single floor lamp. What furniture he has is a muted shade of gray: gray armchair, gray sofa, king-sized bed made up with a matching gray comforter. The bed he’s barely slept in for weeks now, though his aim remains steady—as if some external force were reaching down to brace his hand.

  He switches on the television in time for the morning news with Allie White. White is a striking young Harvard grad who somehow landed a news anchor gig after only a handful of years as a cub reporter. Miles has been tuning in ever since White inherited the broadcast from her aging predecessor, a man with leftist leanings whose words were half garbled by an excess of saliva. Watching White narrate his exploits gives Miles no small thrill.

  At 6:15 a.m., the words Breaking News slide across the screen in blood-red italics. Miles leans forward, raises the volume. The camera closes in on White’s face. She’s wearing jade earrings and a tight blouse with a lace collar. Her blond hair is coiffed in a perfect wave.

  “This just in,” White says.

  Miles wishes her writers had come up with a more original segue.

  “The killer police are dubbing The Night Sniper has struck again.”

  As she reads from the prompter, the camera cuts to a train yard in Queens and pans over a wide expanse of empty subway cars before zeroing in on the crime scene. The immediate vicinity is crowded with bodies—a small sea of reporters all pressed up against one another behind the police tape.

  Miles thinks: Spread the word, Allie.

  White gives sketchy details of the crime. Police are uncertain as to where exactly the man was shot, how far he traveled before arriving at the yard. Going through the list of previous crimes, she lists similarities (a single shot through the heart) and differences (a moving target), then announces that Wake Up, New York has obtained an exclusive interview with a member of the Night Sniper Task Force—none other than Cheryl Mabern, the detective who shot young Jesse Smits in the Avenue D projects just six months ago.

  Huh, a fellow killer, Miles thinks. Or thwarted killer.

  He hopes that her notoriety will not distract the public, that her ignoble shooting of that boy will be in no way associated with his cause.

  The camera frames a male beat reporter standing with Detective Mabern in front of a subway car, then zooms in on Mabern as the reporter asks if the task force has any leads to pursue. The detective, with shallow dimples and a slight cleft in her chin, is surprisingly attractive given her occupation. Not conventionally beautiful, like White, but subtly alluring—like Amy, only with harder edges.

  “What we have on our side,” Mabern says, “is history. History tells us everything we need to know about this guy.”

  “How so?” the reporter asks.

  “If you stack up the profiles of every known serial killer going back to Jack the Ripper, you’ll find only the smallest discrepancies in their biographies. They want you to believe they’re unique—they want you to think they’ve been touched in some way that separates them from the rest of humanity—but the truth is they’re all the same. They were picked on as kids. One or both of their parents were abusive. Their pets died violent deaths. They have no friends, have never been in a relationship that lasted more than a few weeks. They’re usually white, usually male, just about always virgins, and anecdotal evidence suggests that most of them are impotent.”

  Miles digs his fingers into his thighs, feels his spine stiffen.

  “So they’ve replaced sex with violence?” the reporter asks.

  “That’s part of their pathology,” Mabern says.

  “Aren’t they also highly intelligent? Even brilliant?”

  Miles locks eyes with Mabern through the television screen, willing her to give the right answer.

  “That’s pure urban legend,” she says. “Most of them are actually feeble-minded. They were subpar students all through high school, and the few we know of that went to college flunked out. They’re desperate to prove their worth, and that’s why they stand no chance of long-term success: they’re reaching way beyond their natural limits.”

  Miles is off the sofa now, crouched in front of the TV, ready to reach through it.

  “You’re describing a very sad character,” the reporter says.

  “He’s not just sad,” Cheryl continues, “he’s broken. Society has no place for him. He’s as close to human refuse as we get.”

  “Possibly,” the reporter says. “But doesn’t the skill involved in these killings suggest that you’re dealing with a highly functional individual?”

  Mabern gives a derisive sneer, then pretends to cover it up by coughing into her sleeve.

/>   “You can train a chimpanzee to do one thing well,” she says.

  Chapter 10

  Miles forces himself to continue watching as White urges her audience to exercise caution, remain indoors after dark. When she announces the next commercial break, Miles switches off the TV, then replays the interview in his mind while striding back and forth across the apartment.

  Feeble-minded. Impotent. Refuse. Chimpanzee.

  “I’m a surgeon and you’re a goddamned civil servant!” he shouts, then looks around as though he might catch his neighbors listening through the walls.

  I only hope that Amy gets her news from another source, he can’t help but think.

  He continues to pace, finds even his own thoughts taking on Mabern’s cadence.

  She believes she’s untouchable, he tells himself. She thinks her badge grants her some kind of immunity.

  He will disabuse her of this notion. Her death will not be swift and merciful; he will not allow her a place among the Night Sniper’s victims. She will come home to find him waiting with his scalpel. Maybe he will light candles, run a scalding bath, pour her a glass of bitter wine. He will make her last night on earth a very dark romantic comedy.

  And then, all at once, his fury gives way to pity. Mabern, he realizes, was projecting, describing herself. Throughout the interview, it had seemed to Miles that she was trying to mask her hatred of the killer in order to appear professional, but in fact she’d been trying to disguise her own self-loathing.

  She is stuck hating herself, Miles thinks, because the boy she shot did not die. She does not know what it is to liberate a distressed soul. To come so close only to fail: her psyche is damaged in ways she cannot possibly fathom. It is she who’s broken.

  But not beyond repair, Miles thinks.

  He feels a compassion for Mabern unlike any he has experienced before.

  Something about her reminds him of his victims: a vulnerability, a sadness.

  He cannot fix her—he knows this—but he can put her on the path to self-healing. He can show her the way.

  Her attempt to humiliate him was a secret cry for help—a cry aimed directly at him. He must respond, must reveal himself in order to save her. Not in a single flash: he must coax her to him in small, deliberate steps.

  Chapter 11

  I’m sitting at my desk, eating pickled herring from Russ & Daughters and waiting for the phone to ring. It’s been six hours since the interview. So far, nothing—not even a wrong number.

  But I’m feeling good. I’m all the way back now, living and breathing the case, not thinking about Jesse Smits or the time I spent sequestered at the resort for wayward women. I wouldn’t take a benzo if a bottle suddenly appeared on my desk, and no part of me wants that bourbon chaser. I’m the best version of me: alert and ready to work.

  “You were making yourself a target, weren’t you?”

  It’s Pete Cohn, the youngest of us, settling in at his desk with a cup of station-house coffee. We sit opposite each other in the conference room that serves as temporary task force headquarters.

  I smile, feel what must be a sliver of herring stuck between my front teeth. I paw at it with my tongue, hide my mouth behind my hand. Pete has the strongest set of cheekbones in all the NYPD. He could have made ten times his current salary modeling sweaters and swimsuits for those flyers everyone chucks in the trash, but I don’t think he knows it. I don’t get a whiff of ego off Pete: he’s all about the job.

  “I mean in the interview,” he continues, as though answering a question I’d asked. “You weren’t just drawing the Sniper out—you were drawing him to you.”

  I finish clearing my teeth, put my smile back on display.

  “I was starting an argument,” I say. “Here’s hoping our guy has a temper.”

  Pete leans forward, plants his elbows near the center of the desk.

  “Is that how you caught Bryzinski?” he asks.

  I want to believe he’s showing interest in me rather than my career.

  “Bryzinski was different,” I say.

  “Because he only killed men?”

  “And because most of his kills were meant to throw us off track, hide his real target.”

  Pete takes a loud sip of coffee.

  “I heard Randy say you were able to get inside Bryzinski’s head, think along with him.”

  He says it like a question. I’m supposed to tell him how I did it. Now I know his interest is in Cheryl the cop. I try not to look dejected.

  “The only way inside,” I say, “is through the outside.”

  Somewhere behind me a throat clears.

  “Sounds like one of those fortune cookies that ain’t really a fortune,” Dennis says.

  He’s standing over my right shoulder. I turn, see Kelly standing with him.

  “Don’t listen to Dennis,” she says. “He thinks women cops are only good for busting johns.”

  Dennis starts to answer, but Patsy, now hovering over my other shoulder, cuts him off.

  “Tell us about Bryzinski,” she says. “Walk us through it.”

  They’re on every side of me—like theater in the round. It’s Patsy’s stare that makes me understand what they’re really asking. They want to know why I’m here. They want to know what makes me so special. How did a disgraced cop who locked herself up in a pseudo-asylum get called back for a career case? And where’d I get the nerve to do that interview without consulting them first?

  “Listen,” I say.

  But I have nothing to follow it up. Instead, it’s Randy, newly arrived to the circle, who speaks for me.

  “You get inside the killer’s mind by turning everything you know about the crime into a question,” he says.

  Chapter 12

  And we knew precious little,” Randy says.

  He gives them some background. Dead males were cropping up all over the five boroughs, stabbed with a crude instrument: possibly sharpened plastic, no longer than two inches, thin and wobbly, like the blade was taped to the handle. According to the ME, a simple kitchen knife would have made a more reliable weapon.

  “That was the first hint of ritual,” Randy says. “The first suggestion that there was something deliberate in his process, that these killings were personal for him. So the weapon itself became our first question.”

  “Why not swap out the toy blade for a real one?” Patsy asks.

  Randy nods.

  “And what did you come up with?” Pete asks.

  “You mean what did Cheryl come up with?” Randy says. “She was the one who pieced it all together.”

  He gestures for me to take over.

  “We cycled through a lot of possibilities,” I say, “but only one made sense: he was reliving some earlier, original crime.”

  I feel a team of detectives eyeing me, ready to pounce on the smallest mistake.

  “He wasn’t unsophisticated,” I continue. “He knew how to cover his tracks. He didn’t leave behind so much as a speck for forensics, and he threw us for loops by dumping the bodies in random places. And it wasn’t a question of whether or not he could afford a better weapon: like the ME said, a kitchen knife would have been more effective. So these had to be trophy killings—the killer reliving some glory moment, playing it out in every possible detail.”

  Pete looks at me like he wants to be convinced. Dennis looks at me like he doesn’t.

  “So then what was the next question?” Patsy asks.

  “Where?” I say. “There was hardly any blood surrounding the bodies, meaning he killed his victims somewhere else and then dumped them. But twelve murders into his spree, we still hadn’t found an original scene. He had to have some kind of private killing ground. We were thinking a garage, someplace he could drive into with a living victim and drive out of with a corpse. So the next question was: How? How did he lure his victims to this place?”

  I’m feeling it now. It’s like the case has started up all over again. Maybe that’s what Randy’s hoping for. Maybe this i
s his attempt to get me back in the groove, because I can’t imagine why else he’d want the story told. Or maybe he trusts me not to tell the whole story, to leave out the part where Bryzinski got the drop on him.

  “We had good questions to work from,” I say. “The problem was that each question had hundreds of possible answers. We needed a link, some concrete thread that wove all the questions together and made the right answers pop out.

  “It was Bryzinski himself who gave it to us. We started to notice that a good number of his victims were ex-cons. All had been released from Rikers within the past month. There was a little something extra in the way Bryzinski killed them—slash marks and bruises to go along with the stab wounds, indications that the killer took his time, had some fun.

  “Our first thought was a corrections officer,” I say. “Someone who was doing on the outside what he couldn’t do on the inside. But that didn’t feel right to me. To snap like that…we were looking for someone who’d been abused. Not just abused, but systematically degraded, beat down. I tried to put myself in the killer’s place, imagine what could be traumatic enough to keep him going. Only one scenario rang true: these killings represented the moment he fought back, reclaimed his life. We—”

  Pete cuts me off.

  “Bryzinski was a cabbie!” he says, half jumping out of his seat.

  I smile.

  “Yeah, but not even a gypsy company would hire a felon,” I say. “It had to be someone entirely off the books.”

  “Are we closing in on your moment of triumph?” Dennis asks. “’Cause I gotta use the can.”

  This time it’s Patsy who smacks him. Randy gives me a look that says it’s okay to continue.

  I’m about to tell them how Bryzinski found his jailbirds when my phone rings. We all signal at once for everyone to be quiet. I pick up.

  “Task force,” I say.